So They Fought
by Kathryn Claire O'Connor
Summary: #3 in the Junior Initiative series! Blaine's "act of defiance" sparks Fury to send the JID kids on their first mission, which in turn gives Agent Hill the push to do something even more unexpected. *five-shot*
1. Chapter 1

**Part three of the series, here we go! Enjoy!**

* * *

_S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters_

It had been awhile since Nick Fury had been this angry at one of his agents, and this kid – Blaine freaking Barton – wasn't even technically one of his agents. The sixteen year old son of Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov was a sort of S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in training with the small, secretive Junior Initiative Division, as well as the unofficial ward of Fury and Agent Maria Hill.

Truth be told, Fury hadn't had much to do with the upbringing of Blaine and the five – unofficially six – other kids in JID. He had treated them just like he would his best agents and had left the mothering up to Maria. He was their boss, not their father, and he was going to keep it that way.

Either way, he didn't know whether to be upset with Blaine or excited for what his actions meant in the director's eyes.

The boy had been given the assignment – his first real assignment – of hunting the most useless of the JID's, Dakota Stark. Yet, here Agent Hill was, standing in his office and telling him that Blaine hadn't, in fact, killed Dakota, but simply found her in the mountains where she had been abandoned to her death by Agent Hill and "made a different call," bringing her back to the JID building in Vermillion, South Dakota.

On one hand, Blaine's actions showed a blatant disregard for Fury's authority, but on the other hand, it undeniably showed his ability to think like Agent Barton, the father that Blaine had never met. And in the end, that was the entire point of JID.

In the end, Fury turned from the window of his office, going back to looking at Agent Hill as a spark of excitement lit inside him.

"I think that we may have taught them too well," he mused.

Agent Hill looked at him with those wide, mild eyes, but Nick didn't miss the relief behind them at the fact that Dakota was still alive as she asked, "What are you going to do about this?"

"We're going to pull 'the little American' off of the ice and get these kids training in earnest. Their ready to start missions now and I know just where to send them."

* * *

_Junior Initiative Division building, Vermillion, South Dakota_

Sixteen year old Andrew "Andy" Stark's internalized Iron Man suit almost melted with his relief as he saw his thirteen year old half-sister, Dakota, walk into the training room behind Blaine Barton. He practically gasped her name, scrambling to hug her tightly.

"Are you two okay?" Scarlet – Blaine's fourteen year old sister – asked her brother, speaking up from her place in front of a punching bag on the opposite side of Hayne Ross while giving Andy a strange look for his display of affection towards his sister.

"Yeah," Blaine answered weakly, falling down onto a chair at Andy's tech station and putting his head in his hands.

"Have either of you talked to Fury or Maria yet?" Andy asked, looking between Dakota and Blaine.

Both shook their head and Dakota asked, "Why?"

"You have to know that you're in trouble here, Blaine; you don't just randomly disobey Fury's orders and get away with it like that. None of us have. Heck, none of us have ever fought against him before."

"We've never been given a chance to," fifteen year old Hayne's twin sister, Hazel, spoke up, climbing out of the fighting ring where she had just been going a round with Andy.

"I think that's about to change," Andy admitted solemnly. "I talked to Blaine about it a little bit yesterday-"

"And while we were in the mountains, I told Dakota what you told me," Blaine broke in.

Hazel cocked her head, stepping closer to Andy as she asked, "What do you mean 'that's about to change'? What are you even talking about, Andy? What did we miss?"

"Fury tried to order me to kill Koty," Blaine said softly.

"To make him more like Hawkeye," Andy added.

Blaine finished with, "But I didn't."

"Like Hawkeye," Andy repeated. "And the Black Widow, too, I guess, but the Black Widow's not really the point here, I don't think."

"Then what is the point?" Scarlet asked, easily moving beyond what her brother had just revealed. "I'm sorry that it doesn't really surprise me that Fury asked that of him, but it doesn't. If the point is to make Blaine more like Hawkeye, why would Fury be upset that he refused a mark?"

"Because we're supposed to be the _perfected _version of the Avengers – the second generation and all that jazz – and in Fury's book that includes explicit obedience to orders, which he didn't get today."

"So he's going to be ticked off," Blaine shrugged. "Oh well; that's too bad."

"You don't mean that," Scarlet said, calling her brother out on the stress scrawled across his face.

Blaine snapped at her, "Well, I can't go back and change it now, can I? Even if I could, I wouldn't; Dakota's one of our own and we protect each other, even from Fury himself." He looked to Andy, requesting, "Moving beyond my failed hunting trip, tell them what you told me yesterday."

Andy hesitated before clapping his hands together and gesturing for them all to gather around him and Blaine at the tech station. "Okay, kiddies, time for class."

A few keystrokes later, and Andy was into one of the numerous files that he had saved from S.H.I.E.L.D. With twin flicks of his wrist, he blew the file up onto holograms and allowed the others a moment to take it all in.

Hazel asked, "What is all of this?"

"This is JID in a glance, including Fury's plans for us in the near future."

"There's more then that stunt he tried to get Blaine to pull?" Scarlet asked, the mixture of feelings in her tone equating those in Andy's own emotions.

"Much more," Andy assured. "He's even got a whole other person coming to us before long – and until that boy gets here, he's all I'm going to tell you about."

"Is that the 'secret friend' of Fury's that you told me about?" Dakota asked Blaine.

Andy's eyebrow twitched as Blaine nodded and put an arm around Dakota's waist, pulling the redhead closer to him.

Hayne finally spoke up, asking, "What's this 'secret friend's' name?"

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	2. Chapter 2

The boy with dark blonde hair looked Andy in the eye – mature blue for wary brown – and stuck his hand out as Fury made the introductions the very next night.

"JID, this is Ryan, and he's come to be a part of your team."

Andy bit his tongue and played nice, just waiting for the bigger announcement that never came. Heck, Fury never even gave them Ryan's last name – although the kids were now already very well aware of the fact that it was Rogers. The kids were supposed to identify themselves as "Hill" if the need for last names arose.

That was one of Fury's "safety measures." No telling the kids their own last names; they had only found those out because over time when they were younger, Maria had gotten after them by using their full names every once in awhile when no one else was around. Fury said that keeping the teens in their completely uninformed state was to reduce the chances of outside forces harming them, but Andy had never bought it, and even Maria had thought the last name thing was too extreme.

So Andy sat down across from Ryan Rogers and waited for Fury to tell them that they needed to start training for a mission… but the director never did. Once he was certain that Ryan was settled in and that the kids weren't going to kill each other, Fury left them to their own devices.

Considering the way the adults in their lives tended to be towards them, that was the way that they had come to like it – although no one knew where Ryan stood on the subject. Outside of what very little they gleaned from Fury's file on the boy, they didn't know _anything _about the guy.

But Andy kind of thought that it might be time to find out.

He waited until Fury had left and everyone was bedding down for the night before he took advantage of the new, decidedly unappreciated sleeping arrangements that Fury had forced on them – Ryan sharing Andy's room – before he said anything worthwhile to his new roommate.

"Fury didn't really say all that much about you at dinner," Andy offered, sitting on his bed and watching Ryan unpack his few meager belongings. "Is there something that he doesn't want us to know about you?"

Ryan gave him a strange look over his shoulder before turning back to his suitcase. "Not that I know of."

"Not that he's told you," Andy replied. "Fury doesn't tend to come around here much."

"I'm sure he's busy up in New York," Ryan said, totally unconcerned as Andy tried to get a feel for what his mindset was.

In a word, Andy would've picked "oblivious."

"Of course," Andy narrowed his eyes at the back of Ryan's head, deciding to start with the questions that he already knew the answer to. "Say, what's your last name?"

Ryan paused, stiffening before he said, "'Hill' nowadays."

"Hm; me too," Andy replied, standing up and beginning to pace the space between his bed and the one that had been moved in for Ryan earlier in the day. "Security measure."

"Right."

"So, where do you come from? Before S.H.I.E.L.D. I mean. I didn't notice at first, but my sister mentioned that you have a European accent, and I think I can hear it now."

Again Ryan answered the question dubiously as he said, "Antarctica."

Andy turned to face him with upraised eyebrows, eyes full of faux surprise as he asked, "How long did you live there?"

Ryan paled, caught between telling an easy lie or the hard to explain truth.

Andy rolled his eyes and decided to spare him the grief of deciding what to do as he said, "See, here's what I think you are, Stars, Bars, and British. You are the son of one Lieutenant Margaret Carter and the ever stupendous legend, Captain America. I think that you were born in 1944, and that your lovely but mentally broken mother put you in the ice beside Daddy dearest way back in 1960. Am I right yet? See, here's the fun part where I give you an example of what we're dealing with around here. You were discovered in the ice beside your father over five years ago… but we both know that Fury didn't have you de-iced until less than a month ago, did he?"

Ryan was now not only pale, but had sunk down onto the bed, looking up at a fired up Andy. "How do you know all of that?"

"Ah, you see, that's privileged information, Private Ryan." Andy smirked, getting sidetracked as he repeated to himself, "Private Ryan. Nice, I like it."

Ryan's brow momentarily creased in confusion as he said, "I don't understand."

Andy snorted, rolling his eyes. "Of course you don't. It's a movie."

"You never told me how you know those things about me, unless that's something that Director Fury told you?"

Andy just snorted again.

"Agent Hill?"

"Hu-uh," Andy answered shaking his head and pointing to the computers on his desk. "If the information comes from the mouth of an adult, I don't trust it. That's why I've got Sid and his friends."

"Sid?"

"The house's AI." Ryan opened his mouth to ask another question – presumably what an AI was – but Andy cut him off, impatiently asking, "Did they do anything to get you assimilated to the times?"

"Agent Hill tried to do some things, but they all have their own jobs to take care of; for the most part they were too busy to help me. I just stayed in the infirmary until they had established that I had no side effects from…"

"…Being a popsicle?" Andy supplied.

"What do you want from me?" Ryan asked, suddenly snapping at him as he surged to his feet.

Andy didn't blink or even pause as he answered, "To know if you're on Fury's side or ours."

"There's sides? Against your own guardian?" Ryan asked in disbelief.

"Mostly against our tiny world as a whole," Andy said bluntly.

Ryan shook his head, taking a step away from Andy as he muttered, "This is crazy…"

Andy sighed dramatically and laid a hand on the other boy's shoulder. "Welcome to the Junior Initiative Division."

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	3. Chapter 3

"I'm not a mole, you know," Ryan told Andy at seeming random the next morning as they got ready before leaving their shared bedroom for breakfast.

"No, I don't know," Andy replied bluntly. "If it didn't come out of Fury's file, I don't know it about you."

"Well, did the file say anything about my being a mole?" Ryan asked. "Because that is what you were thinking last night, wasn't it?"

"Who says I stopped thinking it since last night?" Andy replied. "And, no, the file didn't say you were a mole, but it didn't say you weren't either."

Ryan rolled his eyes at the back of Andy's head as the boys strode from their bedroom, deciding that his roommate just wasn't a morning person.

"Morning," the girl from last night with auburn hair – was she Scarlet or Hazel? – said as she passed the two of them in the hallway.

Ryan smiled and nodded and Andy glared at her as she bypassed them. Ryan blinked when she did a couple of spontaneous cartwheels, and his eyes widened when she turned to look at him over her shoulder, giving him a look that made him blush to the roots of his hair.

"I'm going to tell Hayne you just did that!" another girl called out as she walked up, coming between Andy and Ryan.

The redhead's grin widened cheerfully as she teased back, "Oh, because it would surprise him so very much."

Andy scoffed as he slung an arm around the shoulders of the girl with ebony hair, informing Ryan, "Scarlet's a piece of work. If you're used to the 1940's code of conduct, she's going to take some getting used to for you."

_Scarlet_, Ryan filed the information away, knowing that it would stay better now than it had last night. _Auburn hair; piece of work._

"You're Hazel, right?" Ryan asked the girl with him and Andy.

She nodded.

"My wonderful girlfriend," Andy with pride, suddenly dipping his head to kiss the girl.

Ryan blinked in surprise at the unusual PDA - or was that the norm nowadays? Agent Hill hadn't mentioned it one way or the other, not that it mattered where he was concerned.

"Watch it," a boy with light brown hair said, tumbling out of his room with said hair unkempt as he almost knocked Andy over. "Geez, man," he – Blaine – grumbled as he realized why Andy had been distracted. "Do we really have to wake up to that?"

"Only if you don't want to deal with an unhappy me," Andy answered; his tone and expression suddenly chipper so he could get at Blaine.

A growl of annoyance forced its way up from Blaine's throat, and he brushed past them with a dismissive roll of his eyes.

A second boy slipped out of the bedroom – Hayne – requesting, "Do me a favor, okay? Do not tick him off; this is the first time in three days that he's agreed to go down and eat breakfast."

Ryan saw Andy's eyes cloud with concern as he replied with the question, "Has he started sleeping again yet?"

"Not that I've seen," Hayne answered with a sigh. "I can't tell, though, if it's from what happened with Dakota or worrying over how Fury's going to react to what he did."

"Didn't do," Andy corrected. "Maybe I should try talking to him about it?"

Ryan watched the whole conversation in confusion as Hazel cringed, contradicting gently, "I wouldn't, not since Dakota's your baby sister. It'll make him even more on edge about it all."

Hayne agreed with a solemn nod of his head, but Andy pointed out, "She's everybody's baby sister in this place."

That was when Ryan heard himself say, "Dakota's not my sister." Hayne, Hazel, and Andy all turned to look at him in surprise, so he continued, "If you want to tell me what happened, I can see if I can get him to talk a little. Sometimes it's easier with a stranger."

"You know," Hazel noted, looking with great interest to edge of the hallway, "I think Dakota might be handling that all on her own."

When the other three followed Hazel's gaze they saw that Dakota was indeed absorbed in conversation with Blaine as the duo walked together towards the staircase that would take them down to the kitchen.

"Oh, for the love of Sid!" Andy groaned, watching them go.

"Yes, Andy?"

Ryan nearly jumped out of his skin when a voice came… out of the walls?

Andy sighed, drawling, "I take it you've never heard of an AI until I mentioned him last night, right?"

"I'll explain it to you after classes are over, Ryan," Hayne volunteered.

"You do realize that we take _online _classes, right?" Andy inquired of Ryan.

Ryan nodded. "Agent Hill forewarned me of that."

"Speaking of classes," Hayne declared. "We're going to get a late start on them if we don't get down to breakfast now."

Andy and Hazel started obediently towards the stairs, but Hayne lagged behind, asking Ryan, "Do you think you're ready for this?"

"That depends on what 'this' is."

"The JID… the six other teens that are in JID?"'

Ryan shook his head, admitting, "I honestly have no clue."

"Okay. Did anyone tell you who the Avengers were?"

"Agent Hill gave me a very minimalistic profile of the six of them."

"Well, here's the who's who and the what's what, then. The Junior Initiative Division is here to train the eight of us to be the next generation of the Avengers; we're self-taught now, since Maria isn't really around anymore. We haven't seen Coulson or any of our other trainers since Maria moved out of here, oh… five years ago. In Fury's perfect world, you must be Captain America. Andy is Iron Man, Scarlet is Black Widow, Blaine is Hawkeye, I am the Hulk, and Dakota and Hazel are expendables. We don't have a Thor… at least not yet. It wouldn't surprise me if Fury's got him stashed somewhere like he did you."

"I seriously doubt Thor, Jr. is being stored up like I was," Ryan said, thinking of the block of ice where he had spent the last fifty-plus years.

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	4. Chapter 4

"Okay, my worshippers," Andy said grandly, sliding on his socks into the entertainment room at the end of the day. "We need to have a meeting at my tech station down in the training level."

There were numerous eye-roles at his term of address – Scarlet even threw a throw pillow at him – but Hazel kept to the bigger picture and asked, "Why?"

Andy's grandeur stopped and his antics dropped down a rung as he answered, "Because we've got a heck of a lot of crap coming up – I don't know exactly when – and it looks like Fury doesn't want us to know about it until the day of."

"So?" Hayne asked.

"So our not knowing could get someone killed – one of us. I don't know what Fury's thinking, not telling us to prepare, so I'm going to do it for him."

That got the group on their feet and heading towards the training center.

On the way there, Scarlet guessed, "Is he going to send us out on a mission?"

"Uh-huh," Andy said, flopping down into his captain's chair in front of the multiple monitors and beginning to get to the desired files.

"Who?" Hayne asked.

"All of us but Dakota," Andy answered in the same even tone, and only Dakota and Hazel knew just how nervous that tone meant he actually was.

"Where to?" Ryan asked, finally speaking up.

"Asgard…" Andy drawled, beginning to open up files and photos.

"Where is that?" Dakota asked in confusion.

Andy snorted. "It's an entirely different planet."

"Thor's home planet," Ryan remembered.

"Right," Andy nodded. "Apparently, Thor's daughter needs rescuing, and we're going to be sent in to do it."

"An extraction," Hayne said.

Blaine muttered, "There are worse types of missions."

"Yeah, well," Andy continued, pulling up one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s profiles. "Here's our problem. Loki. He was raised as Thor's brother, and thought himself worthy of being the crown prince of Asgard. Then he found out that he was adopted, and went on a little bit of a rampage, part of which is known as the Battle of Manhattan. That was when the Avengers first assembled. After this battle, Thor – who should've stayed when he went back to Asgard once Loki was captured and ruled the Nine Realms – did no such thing. He chose to come back to earth and live with the Avengers instead, which left Asgard wide open for a Loki-takeover, which Loki of course saw to. Things were going roughly for our favorite super-villain for the first few months until Thor's infant daughter got beamed up to Asgard, presumably to live with her daddy. Thor, of course, wasn't there, and Loki took her in instead, 'raising' her until she was ten. At this point, she became his child bride, and he became the undisputed king of the Nine Realms."

"Ew," Scarlet said in disgust.

"Where do we come in here?" Ryan asked, leaning against the desk beside Andy.

"Thor's daughter – Eif – is now fifteen. Now, as we can all imagine, Loki never made her life a picnic, but the longer that she's in that environment, the more worried Fury is becoming for her – mentally, physically, emotionally, the whole shebang. As a quarter-god… goddess, she apparently possesses powers that Fury wants to harness for his own arsenal-"

Ryan finished, "-So he wants us to retrieve her and bring her back here to JID."

"Right," Andy nodded, whirling away from his monitors to face the group that had formed a semicircle around his chair.

"But you don't know when," Blaine clarified.

"Looks like it'll most likely be within the year," Andy said. "From what I can find, Fury and Maria are a little grid-locked on it. Fury wants to wait at least a year, and Maria's torn; she knows Eif needs help immediately, but she also knows that we're not ready for a mission of that magnitude."

"So what's your plan?" Ryan asked.

"We get ready."

"How?"

"Here," Andy said, gesturing around the huge room. "For as long as we have until Fury ships us out, we train like our lives depend on it."

Blaine voiced what everyone else was thinking. "Because they will."

Ryan slapped the desk resolutely and straightened up, striding towards the wrestling ring. "Then let's get it together." He climbed into the ring and looked back at the others, asking evenly, "Anyone care to join me?"

"I would," Hayne said, making his way towards the ring. "But that doesn't strike me as a fair fight."

Blaine rolled his eyes and cracked his neck as he joined Ryan in the ring, eager to take out some of his barely pent-up frustrations.

"P.S." Hayne said as Ryan and Blaine got into a starting position. "I was right about Fury having a Thor, Jr. stored up somewhere."

"I think I would've preferred the ice over Loki," Blaine muttered before lunging at Ryan.

* * *

Blaine, now sixteen, had expected an immediate reaction from Director Fury once the man found out that he had not, in fact, killed Dakota Stark, but he got nothing of the sort. Until six months later, at two a.m. He was in the training room, letting loose arrow after arrow. Between the extra practice that the six – since Dakota wasn't included – had been doing, and Blaine's tendencies towards insomnia and dealing with it through target practice, he had gotten very good with his bow and arrows. It was rare that he missed the target now, but in order for that to happen, he sometimes concentrated _too much _on it and forgot to be aware of anything else.

Like Fury coming into the room.

When Blaine got five consecutive arrows into the bull's-eye, he heard someone behind him begin to clap slowly.

The boy in black froze when he heard the man to whom his back was turned say dryly, "So you _can_ hit a target."

Blaine set his bow down slowly, saying calmly, like he didn't know he was being defiant – like he didn't notice the sudden charge of tension in the air, "When I want to, yes."

"But you didn't want to kill Dakota?"

"She didn't deserve it, and we both know it."

"So you would kill someone if they _did _deserve it?" Fury asked evenly. "You obviously have the skill set for it."

Blaine swallowed, acutely aware of Fury's unnerving gaze burning into the back of his skull. "That depends on who decides it's deserved."

"You'll agree with me on this one, I'm sure, considering how much Andy has already leaked to you and your friends," Fury said icily.

Blaine stiffened. The JID teens had always suspected that Fury knew about Andy's hacking – it was nearly impossible that he didn't – but it had never been addressed until now. Somehow bringing it up at the moment felt like a threat, and it made Blaine's hand curl around his bow.

"Your rebellion with Dakota will be wiped away and I'll continue to ignore Andy's indiscretions – on one condition."

Blaine waited.

"Kill Loki."

"Done."

"Aren't you going to ask me how you're going to meet up with the god?"

He didn't answer. Fury already knew that he knew.

"In that case, I'll see you and the others for breakfast. Come prepared to pretend that you don't already know everything about it when I tell you the big news."

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	5. Chapter 5

Dakota hadn't felt this sort of sickening dread and terror in six months, since the day that she herself had been slated to die. It was the same feeling, she thought, but different – worse somehow. This wasn't her life on the line, this wasn't her being thrown headfirst into the unknown without any real experience; it was the other kids in her family – every single one of them – and that was what made it so much worse.

The fourteen year old fought hard to keep her cool while so many thoughts whirled in her head as she went with the others to the front door of the JID Building. What if they didn't come back? What if they died, or were kidnapped? What if, what if, what if… She simply could not let them go! She could not let them all put themselves in that great an amount of danger.

But what say did she really have? None. What choice did she have but to let them go on this mission? None. They had to go, and she had to let them. It was as simple – and as hard – as that.

So she hugged them all as they walked out the door and got in the SUVs that would take them to the jet that would take them to S.H.I.E.L.D. She hugged Andy a little harder than the others, and when no one was looking, she took a chance and gave Blaine a desperate peck on the lips.

It was the first time she had done anything of the sort, really, let alone with Blaine, even though the feelings had obviously started to grow between them, and her actions startled him. She had been an idiot to let herself fall for the guy who had tried to kill her – no matter how coerced he had been – and this was where it had gotten her.

Alone, watching them being driven away from the Junior Initiative Division Building and hoping with her whole being that they would all come back safely.

* * *

Afterwards, once the mission was all over, every one of them would swear that they didn't remember much about what had happened. It had all gone down so quickly, and so the only place they were able to recall it vividly was in their nightmares – of which, upon their return to earth, there was suddenly plenty.

Dakota recalled only that those literally less than thirty-six hours where she had been alone at JID with only Sid's dry voice for company had felt like thirty-six separate lifetimes. Those who had gone on the mission all had vague recollections of being sent through the portal to Asgard, but once they were at the palace they had split up, and so their memories varied.

As the six teenagers went their varied ways at the palace, Ryan had ended up being the one to make the first actual contact with Eif, who had been confused and frightened when he had appeared in her chambers. Apparently no one had told the queen of Asgard – or any Asgardians for that matter – that she was being stolen away to earth that day.

_The blonde teenager was obliviously reading in her room when Ryan suddenly burst in, gasping in breathless inquiry, "Eif?"_

_"__What do you want?" she asked, blue eyes blown wide as she took him in._

_"__To get you off of this prison of a planet. Come with me and I swear Loki will never hurt you again."_

_"__How do I know that wouldn't be exchanging one captor for another?" she asked testily, although Ryan thought he saw… something in her eyes. She wanted what he was saying to be the truth._

_"__I don't have time to explain. Think of it this way: if you stay with Loki, you know he'll continue to hurt you; come with me and I'll see to it that you at least have a chance to be safe."_

_And her life with Loki had been so bad that the statement alone had been enough to get her to nod and go along with him. She dropped her cape from where it was hanging off of her shoulders, leaving a puddle of red fabric on the floor as she grabbed a candelabrum for a weapon and padded into the hall, almost stepping on his heels as they went._

_They hadn't gone three feet before a servant came up, looking ready to try and intervene but having no weapons to do it with. _

_Ryan raised a point on the one piece of weaponry Fury had been given to him – a star-shaped shield – to the maid's throat, saying, "She's coming willingly, and whether or not any of you like it."_

_The brunette at the end of the shield's point looked at him with wide eyes, glancing behind him at her mistress for confirmation._

_Eif's tone begged for understanding as she said, "I have to get away from Loki, Idun. Tell Sif that I'm okay and safe."_

_The maid vanished and Ryan and Eif continued on without incident to the door of the palace where Andy, Hayne, Hazel, and Scarlet were keeping the guards at the entryway busy. Somehow they had managed to keep any alarms from being set off, miracle of miracles._

_"__Let's get out of here," Ryan called to the quartet. "I got Eif."_

_But they still had to knock the guards out – or worse – and they weren't having a great amount of success with that._

_"__Move!" Eif suddenly ordered._

_Just like that, the two groups separated, neither sure who the queen was talking to. With a wave of Eif's hand, a sudden, fierce howl of snowy air blew in through an open window, hitting the guards with enough force to knock them into the opposite wall – and unconscious once they hit said wall._

_The other teenagers gaped at her, but she just blew out a breath, saying lightly, "What? Can't you mortals do that?" They shook their heads, and Eif shrugged. "Are we ready to go?"_

_"__Wait," Scarlet spoke up. "Where's Blaine?"_

The boy in question had separated from the group and gone off on an errand of his own – Fury's errand, the one that none of the others had known anything about. Ryan and Scarlet had gone in search of him, both intent upon telling him off once they located him. Any questions they or any of the others had, though, froze in their throats when they saw the blood that the boy was covered in – not his own – and the haunted look in his eyes.

They had been lucky; Blaine had been the only one who had ended a life that day, and they weren't about to force him to talk about it. They certainly didn't guess who he had killed, or how happy the occupants of the Nine Realms were when they heard about Loki's death.

When the seven teens got back to the JID Building – exhausted and beaten despite having accomplished their mission – they were instantly hit with another, even more overwhelming dilemma when Sid's voice met them while they were still outside the house.

"Andy?"

"Yes, Sid?" the seventeen-year-old asked tiredly.

"Dakota wishes for you and the all the others to go through the back entrance and meet her in the training level."

"Sid, why?"

"Agent Hill is here."

Andy snapped, "Sid, so what?"

"It appears that she has brought the Avengers as well."

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**Reviews are my new best friend if you feel inclined to drop me one! Thanks! The sequel, "So They Met," should be posted soon, so keep your eyes open for it!:)**


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